Podcast: The Computer Weekly Downtime Upload – Episode 30

In this week’s episode of the Computer Weekly Downtime Upload Podcast, Brian McKenna, Caroline Donnelly and Clare McDonald reunite after their summer break to talk about the week in tech.

• This week’s discussion covers off HPE’s efforts to make its hardware manufacturing processes more sustainable, the financial services industry’s cloud usage habits, and  hears how people with chronic illnesses are receiving a helping hand from a charity to find tech jobs.
• The team kicks off this week’s discussion with a brief run-through of the tech conferences they’ll be respectively covering over the next few weeks, which include Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco (Brian), the NetEvents Global Press and Analyst Summit in San Jose (Caroline), the OVH Summit in Paris (Caroline), and Splunk.conf in Las Vegas (Clare).
• Caroline provides an overview of the investigative work she has being doing of late, looking at how the financial services industry’s adoption of cloud computing has sped up in recent years, thanks to the development of a more accommodating regulatory landscape, and competitor concerns. As she explains, for the best part of a decade, it was roundly assumed by the tech industry that financial services firms would be the among the slowest to move to cloud (if they were able to at all), but with numerous firms setting out plans to go all-in on cloud, it seems those fears may have been misplaced.
• From here, the discussion moves on to Brian’s recent visit to HPE’s Technology Renewal Centre in Erskine near Glasgow, which is a former manufacturing site for ex-PC maker Compaq, which HPE acquired in 2002. Nowadays, the site is where HPE refurbishes and upcycles old PCs, servers and other types of IT equipment to sell on within the wholesale market, and save it from passing into landfill, with Brian discovering during his visit that for a couple of the workers there it is veritable family business.
• Brian also provides a run-through of the likely talking points at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, and predicts that the firm’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Larry Ellison, will use his time at the show to give its cloud rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) a kicking once more.
• At the time of recording, Computer Weekly’s annual diversity and inclusion event (hosted each year in collaboration with Mortimer Spinks) was just a few short weeks away. In acknowledgement of that, Clare offers listeners a brief overview of the themes of this year’s show, along with a preview of who will be speaking and how the day itself is due to run.
• Sticking with the theme of diversity and inclusion, Clare talks about an employment charity called Astriid that helps sufferers of chronic illnesses and long-term medical conditions find work in the technology industry. As an example of the work they do, she references a recent interview she did with a tech worker and chronic fatigue syndrome sufferer, Victoria Clutton, who has benefited from the charity’s intervention to find a new job at Altran UK as a Sharepoint co-ordinator.